With ‘Fifth Estate,' the secret is out about Cumberbatch

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“The Fifth Estate,” a fictionalized rendering of the rise of WikiLeaks, offers a prime example of what a dramatic feature offers that even a documentary as fine as “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” cannot. Benedict Cumberbatch restores mystery to the personality of WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, and fascination to his role as a global crusader for free speech.

Ultimately, Assange comes off as too careless, self-centered and personally secretive to lead a movement that depends on cooperation and transparency. But Cumberbatch freshens up his hyperbolic eloquence. He conjures the magnetic effect Assange could have on people around him.

The star of the BBC's terrific “Sherlock” series as well as “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” Cumberbatch imbues Assange with a startling, otherworldly charisma. He makes audiences as well as his followers
believe that protecting the identities of whistle-blowers and disseminating their documents on the Internet will skewer corrupt nations and businesses and empower citizens around the world. He flamboyantly conveys how a slippery personality can seize a bold idea and enlist more conventional, responsible people in his cause.

Despite Assange's highly publicized bellyaching over the script, Cumberbatch makes him seem more attractive than he is in the news conferences and cinema verite of “We Steal Secrets.” He's a one-man risky business, but he's a spellbinder, too, whether in a lecture hall or a computer geek's cluttered apartment.

The movie is mostly the story of how Assange and a crucial recruit, steady, idealistic IT expert Daniel Berg (Daniel Brühl), formed WikiLeaks' dysfunctional core. Yet they still managed to engineer, in 2010, the biggest leak of classified materials in history – U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning's trove of documents about the Iraq and Afghan wars and his database of State Department emails.

The thrill is supposed to come from the film's intimate rendering of the internal dissension in WikiLeaks, widely reported in the press when Assange was accused of sexual assault in Sweden. (He's still living in the sanctuary of the Ecuadorean embassy in London to evade a European arrest warrant for questioning.) The suspense and intrigue are meant to stem from our wondering whether Assange and Berg can hold their partnership, and WikiLeaks, together.

Yet the moviemakers can't use this pair to focus everything they want to say about the acceleration of the information revolution, the need to create online whistle-blowers' havens, and the perils of posting unedited documents that could endanger innocent individuals working in war zones or under repressive regimes.

In “The Fifth Estate,” Berg, the audience's sane surrogate in the action, provides the common-sense grounding and detail work that WikiLeaks needs to get up and running. Brühl's Berg is a rapt accomplice whose devotion verges on hero worship. He becomes disillusioned after witnessing Assange's reckless manipulations of individuals and organizations and his cruel behavior to people as important to Berg as his parents and his lover Anke Domscheit (Alicia Vikander, in a nothing role). The comparison to “The Social Network” is inevitable. But “The Fifth Estate” lacks that film's crackling wit, lucidity and intensity.

Director Bill Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer attempt too many things at once. The opening credits alone take us from cave paintings and fireside storytelling to the publication of Bradley Manning's war logs. Then the movie flashes back – an overfamiliar device and one that doesn't serve this hectic narrative. WikiLeaks' early string of exposés is amazing: Kenyan human rights violations, Scandinavian bank frauds, Peruvian oil scandals, the “secret bibles” of Scientology. The film uses them mostly to emphasize the antihero's peripatetic lifestyle and WikiLeaks' burgeoning reputation.

This movie catapults audiences into the virtual mind-set of Assange, both dramatically and visually. The action repeatedly depicts Assange as a man who doesn't acknowledge normal physical events like “day” and “night” as he lunges around Kenya, Germany, Iceland and England.

The movie uses one version of his troubled, hazy, roustabout childhood to explain his rambling elusiveness as an adult. But the film is most successful when Condon draws you into Berg's perception of Assange's Internet reality as a universe within the universe, peopled by shadowy lieutenants who exist only as pseudonyms for Assange. But the jacked-up editing, hyper pace and eclectic visual style prove to be more exhausting than expressive.

As if this story weren't complicated enough, Condon and Singer develop a whole other plot line featuring Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci as members of the U.S. State Department. WikiLeaks' release of Manning's State Department database puts her best Libyan source and oldest friend at mortal risk. It's admirable to indicate that the State Department worked quickly to ensure no one would come to harm. But the action is tacked on and clunky. And not even Linney can rise above lines like, “Remember that New Year's Eve party in Sharm al Sheihk?” (She does have one hilarious bit reading an embarrassing email.)

Still, when all else fails, the movie boasts the excitement of seeing Cumberbatch embody Assange as a will o' the wisp with an iron will – a perfect spokesman for the idea that controversial thoughts and information can streak through the Web and maintain or increase their powers of provocation. He holds men and women in his thrall without revealing anything about himself. His instincts are more abstract than human, yet Cumberbatch imbues him with slyness and alertness.

With a knack for keeping one step ahead of his attackers
and his followers, he's a perpetually moving target. With close associates, he's a soul-teaser – he keeps persuading people that he has one and that someday they'll see it.

A shot of Assange dancing in “We Steal Secrets” makes him look creepy and alone, lost in some private vapor. When director Condon expands on that shot in “The Fifth Estate,” Assange undulates in a way that takes in the entire dance floor – like an octopus, as one character puts it. Cumberbatch as Assange brings the film a coiling fascination that keeps it humming even when it collapses under the weight of its own ambition.

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